KFC : Secret Recipes of a 3d artist

Sketch Chat... in msn messenger.

2006-04-29T20:32:00.000+08:00

I always wanted to post some of my record on using the sketch function in msn messenger. I do have a habbit to sketch things instead of typing it in words. This could be due to the reason I starting to feel the pain of losing drawing opportunities at work. Most of the time I'm constrained to just working on technical issue with animations instead of having the chance to do concept art.
Oh well... here's one of the recent chat with a friend in the middle of the night. I was quite tired and in the middle of getting a very tricky scene done. Before I collapsed on the table. I started sketching something on my wacom....

KFC writes:

-youbi says:

so nice ah

KFC writes:

-youbi says:

nice ah

KFC writes:

-youbi says:

u so boring ah

-youbi says:

this gal nt cute le

KFC writes:

-youbi says:

dun wan la

-youbi says:

nt SLEEP YET

-youbi says:

u le

KFC writes:

-youbi says:

what happend ah

KFC writes:

-youbi says:

KFC writes:

-youbi says:

really have alot of work meh

KFC writes:

-youbi says:

woo o

-youbi says:

geng

-youbi says:

ur drawing really geng

-youbi says:

pui fuk pui fuk

KFC writes:

-youbi-BYEBYE ~ says:

sure la

KFC : Mac Sux... But I buy it anyway. Atleast they are sexy. writes:

-youbi says:

KFC writes:

-youbi says:

rude la

-youbi says:

KFC writes:

Well.... until this point... the girl just log off right away.... Hahaha....
hmmm.... seems like another bad way to impress girls. *shrug*

Zbrush works in MacOSX86

2006-04-05T00:18:00.000+08:00

What a pleasant surprised.
Zbrush 2.03 actually works out of the box in Mac0sx86 10.4.5 even without QE and CI support for my Geforce 6800 Ultra.
I'm running it with my 2 years old p4 3.0 gig. So far, some app works and some app hasn't work yet. But overall performance wise. I'm quite happy with what I'm using now.
I only occasionally reboot to xp for Dota.

Suxx azz mac asia!!

2006-04-03T14:42:00.000+08:00

Here's my complain.
I'm a mac user for a while and a long time pc/sgi user. I'm very familiar with devices or platform issues. Atleast that's what I had told the salesman at mac asia. At that very moment, I was enquiring informations about Macbook pro which I desperately wanting to buy one.
But problem is, due to the one of the salesman which I feels better to talk to not around that day. I have to look for other salesman to ask about the macbook pro. The moment I steps in, I feel I wasn't really attended or they don't really pay attention to ppl who doesn't dress like rich enough to buy their machine.
ok... i can understand that. I know i was dressing up like a low wage designer anyway.
So I took the initiative to ask one of the guy about the laptop i had my eye on. But unfortunately he doesn't really sounds friendly to me at all. No good from the sales and marketing point of view. He sounds a little cocky actually.
What I was trying to find out was the upgrades for ram if i want to tops it up with 2 gigs and see if there's a chance to trade in the 512mb ram comes with it.
I was surprised that they don't willing to do it. This really pissed me off because this is not the way that business suppose to be. and the most pissing thing about it is the way they address the matter. They even said the 2 gig ram going to cost me about RM 1700 - 1800 (800-900 each gig). Which comes to my suprise that kingston also selling those (what they so called custom made ram) PC2-5300 for RM430 each at lowyat. And keep argueing that those ram from lowyat will damage the machine.
Well... he sorta like commented that I didn't do my research b4 visiting them.
At some point, I feel I'm abit offended here.
The ram they were talking about is the exact ram that we are using in our pentium M processors laptop at the moment. And it's the exact ram that we are using for the latest duo core pc laptops. how come it's not compatible with macbook pro?? they are selling it for higher price. i'm ok with it. but wtf they wanna make it sounds like going to void the warranty (that's exactly what he said). I read it from somewhere that mac laptops ram is self-serviceable since a few years ago. I guess our local Mac asia is misleading our local mac users.

:angry:

anyway, I've got better service from some other shops at lowyat. In fact I've visited 2 shops yesterday. 1 at 2nd floor Cycom which is selling mac at a corner. They willing to trade in back the ram and install the market priced 2 gig ram for me at a reasonable price. While the ground floor mac shop (which is authorised dealer, seems like not Mac asia) does gave me a better feeling. atleast they treat me like a customer and willing to give me quite a few free gifts like Mouse and a carry case.

I guess i'll be back to lowyat for the purchase in this month.

Does anyone out there got the same feeling as I do?

How world has changed....

2006-03-20T03:53:00.000+08:00

I still wonder how many people out there still sturbborn enough to claim "impossible" on anything.
Reason is because seeing all of the things that happen in the industry and around us.
Alot of impossible miracle has happened just right infront of us from time to time. Especially since year 2005.
-Alias acquired Kaydara
-Discreet acquired Alias
-Disney acquired Pixar
-Adobe acquired macromedia
-Mac adopted Intel processors
-I finally like mac and decide to buy one
-Petrol price raised for 4 times in 2 years
-Our PC can install OSX
-Intel Mac can install window XP
-etc

Well.... after seeing all of this and putting it together in a list do show me a picture of endless possibilities is ahead of us.
Only thing stopping us from making the "impossible" to be reality is only our perception from believing in ourselfs.

Now.... who can tell me how can I possibly finish 7-8 3D jobs in a month (April). Ha... I guess I've just got to work extra hard and wippping my 3d boys like crazy.

One thing I'm happy enough for the moment is the amount of jobs that's available for all of the animators and artist in my studio.

偶尔会幻想自己在刀锋下游走的感觉。。。
还好还没失去灵魂与热诚。
好想在工作都安定下来时想想以后的人生计划，之前花太多时间在干活而忘了喘气的空间。

突然很想去巴黎。。。

I'm a Jedi knight!!

2006-03-13T13:21:00.000+08:00

Got to say, being a jedi knight is every boys dream.
I've finally became one in real life... thanks to Hafeez for letting me to have a swing with his light saber.
http://rapidshare.de/files/15369990/kfc_lightsaber.mov.html <---- Download clip here.

Quenching my Apple Desire.

2006-02-22T10:14:00.000+08:00

I've just got a new member to my list of computers to be exploits.
Introducing a 02's iBook. I've just bought it last night from a guy at RM1300.
What for? Well.... for it's ergonomic design, esthetic look and the sweet OSX of course.

The battery is a little weak at the moment. But once I've got the time, I'll do a little upgrade on it. New battery, Airport card and more ram is not to be missed.

All this will roughly cost me another RM600 for the upgrade (estimated).

Considering alot of people has been cracking their head just to get their osx86 work in the pc. I guess my move is not a bad one for a cheap hands on machine. Oh.... And once I get tiger running on it. I guess there's not much reason for me to get osx86 to work in my Ferrari anyway.

Currently, the GUI is a little slow due to the limitation of ram and processor. I've to turn off shadow, switch dock animation to scale and turn off font smoothing to gain more speed out of the interface. Overall for general use, it's not too bad after all.

And for speaker quality. It's surprisingly crysp and clear compare to my ferrari laptop. Kudos for apple for making it such quality product!

Head Modeling update

2006-02-10T02:52:00.000+08:00

For the previous model, most of the person I asked can't tell who am I modeling here.
I sure do hope the newer update rings a bell.

Character Wip - Exercise continues 2

2006-01-25T18:26:00.000+08:00

Here's a follow up of the character model.

I've been modeling this without using image plane reference at all except some photo reference from different angle instead of flat front and side plane.
Reason is I feel this keeps me focusing in getting the shape right instead of getting it only accurate from front and side. I can see alot of newbie making such mistakes. Looks good front othographic view but looks wierd in the 3d view.
Anyway, I'll be really happy if someone can spot who am I modeling here.

Character Wip - Exercise continues

2006-01-24T18:10:00.000+08:00

I've just registered a domain name for my blog and my personal online porfolio site.
The new domain name for my personal blog is http://kfc79.co.nr
while my personal online portfolio site is http://kong.co.nr

good thing about it is, it's free. Get urs today from http://co.nr

At studio. we are quite free at the moment. Everybody is trying to find something interesting to do . Like modeling exercise and painting practice. Once I've got those domain name registerations done. I've continue on the character model that I've been working on.

:D anyway, I do hope someone can recognise which celebrity that i'm modeling here.
Cheers....
I'll get it textured and detailed in zbrush once I'm happy with the base mesh.

Demostration on Channel lighting

2006-01-23T21:15:00.000+08:00

Today I had a little demostration on how to utilize Maya 7 render passes and channel lighting in AFX.

I started with getting 3 passes ready.

starts with a RGB pass which lit up by 3 lights in red, green and blue in 3 point light source method.

Now an Ambient pass with "0" Ambient Shade.

And also an Ambient Occlusion pass for final Overlay (or multiply/add) over the final image for the soft GI look.

Here's the result after a few tweak around the intensity, gama, shadow attributes and colors of light source.

My team starting to dig this method for our rendering pipeline. This will greatly speed up our workflow. From now on, we can do adjustments to rendering on the fly.
However, I do notice that this method only works good on "hero" product shots, Characters, Props and etc. While standard GI or AO renderings for digital sets are still required depends on shots.
Our team is getting a little more excited now. We'll have zbrush, silo, modo in our new pipeline. And idealy we'll upgrade our workstations to future mactel's power Mac running on Intel processors. I wonder what can beat a machine with OSX, windows and Linux running in the same machine. haha....

Head Modeling exercise.

2006-01-18T19:44:00.000+08:00

getting a little more free than the previous day. Got to do something in order to practice on modeling in silo.
Here's the wip.
next step to Zbrush.

Copy cats!!

2006-01-14T12:38:00.000+08:00

For a person like me who eat and breath in Malaysia. We all know how corrupted Malaysian is.
Did u know that our national anthems was "pirated" from else where?
I've found out that Malaysian's National Anthems song was actually copied from a Hawaiian melody name "Mamula Moon".
check this out.
http://www.paulooi.com/2005/10/26/mamula-moon/

Here's another one...
Our NTV7 Logo

Is a direct copy of ABC7 from USA.

sigh.... what's wrong with them? can't they design something original by themselves?

If u think this is bad... here come the most annoying one.

Mascot for Olympic 2008 in China is copied from Japanese Anime....

When will Asians starting to respect originality?

Creature Design - Turtle (Zbrush Test)

2006-01-05T18:46:00.000+08:00

I'm designing a character based on turtle. well... This gives me a great opportunity to take zbrush for the test.
It started out with less than 300 polys (head). When I imported it in to zbrush, I've subDivided it for about 8 times (a few millions of polygons). Did a little remodeling on the overall shape and then added alot of displacements like veins, bumps, textures and etc on it.
Once it done, with a little help from documentations and notes by some fellow zbrush artists. I've manage to get it rendered in Prman.
Here's how it looks like at the moment with only displacements.
No bump applied... :D it's the magic of prman.

My wip for shortfilm

2005-11-21T17:25:00.000+08:00

Here's a little update for a character that i'm working on for my short film. It's still in an early wip stage. I've only modelled a head for this character.
I made this mock-up just as an experiment of the look that i wanted to achieve for my character. Here it is....

Escape Plan from Works.

2005-10-30T02:18:00.000+08:00

Here's my little escape plan from work. In fact, I'm already over work for the past few months. I can't deny the fact that I need the money. But spending some money on my favorite album and having some fun around (not too far from home) is pretty much a great refreashments from jobs.

Getting the album from Daniel?? The girly looking Malaysian Idol guy? I don't think so, he's just not my cup of tea.

But he's just so damm popular now... When he was singing on stage, girls down there scream as if there's no tomorrow.

eh... wtf they are lining up there for? got free cake or what? hmmm.... they are just queing up for signature and photo taking with their favorite Malaysian Idol. I have a mixed feeling about this. I'm not fancy any of the Malaysian Idol but I got lucky to bumped in to their live performance on stage. To tell u guys the truth, their singing are a little horrible with alot of scream "aid" from fans. Daniel sorta keep having moment of missed tune or completely wrong beat. hmmm.... maybe he's just getting a little shaky at his solo performance when he saw girls dripping salivar over the floor and he almost slipped during the performance. sigh.... girl nowadays.

So.... what album I've actually bought?

Here is it... A "latin Lounge" album and a "Songs for Carbriolets". It's not some ordinary songs from pop singers. They are pretty much more like independent music makers from over the world. The Latin Lounge is my favorite for their sexiness and smoothness of their music. All songs are very different from what we always heard over the local radio which I can say drop dead boring until I found this from the music store. Another great one is "Songs for Carbriolets" well... some may think that if it's specifically made for Chevy... do i need a real Chevy ride to enjoy the experience? well... to tell you the truth, it's always better to have a real Chevy to get the true feeling. But for the time being, I'd rather invest in a better sounds system in order to fully enjoy the audio quality of this album. For those who wonder, this album is all about vintage music from the "Cha Cha" period.
Check it out if you would like to have a little alternative from your usual music collections.
Well worth my RM112 Spent. Ready for some Cuban beat? :D

Here's my next plan
It's the Euro Fun Park at Bandar Utama. hahaha....
I always miss this since I was a child.... I merely remember the experience I was on one of this in childhood with my parents. Time flies.....

These sure brings back memories... but i'm a little too old for that now.

I had a great ride on this. It felt as if I was flying in the mid air...

Everybody is in the line for.....

The Wheel....

Look at the ppl down there... the lights.... and atmosphere. you can't deny that everyone down there is having fun.

I had mine. have you?

Got to thank rachel for taking me here.

Had a few attempts at getting one of these to rachel. But no luck....

See how cute those bear bear is? awww....
Anyway, I'm doing better at claw machine in getting dolls. haha...

I had the greatest day of the week today. Eventhough I have to work for tomorrow (sunday), But I still do feel that it's the greatest refreshments I've ever had for a long time since.
Cheers and wish everybody have a nice day.

Jobs Jobs Jobs.

2005-10-29T00:47:00.000+08:00

Have u guys ever chocked over work pile up like mountains?
I'm sure alot of u guys did....
As for me, I'm going thru a stage where works just came in out of nowhere and I have to get them done in order to earn the clients' cash.
Is this wrong?
Well... at some extends, everybody need to live on wage. And I have no excuse to be exceptional too. For some reason I've accepted a job lately that i'm still working on.
Just today during a meeting, I've got some bizzare feedback from client about stuff that I need to change and their complains about my scheduling. In order words, they expect me to be there at their studio almost everyday including Deepavali and Hari Raya. I've insisted that I need to be away for 2 days in hari raya.
Am I really that dry for money? Am I really that sissey to debate with him regarding the issue? No, I was just too lazy to and tire to defend my position and rather just get things done.
From their reaction, I can see that they aren't that satisfy with my performance so far judging from my "attendance" to their studio. If this job is a "freelance" job, now being in their office and unable to have flexible personal life definately doesn't sounds like a freelance job at all.
So this story tells me that, never to work for this client again unless I really in need of the job. But for the time being. I'll just continue to be mr. nice guy to full fill every request from them.

Chow... time for sleep.

A little weekend adventure.

2005-10-25T10:36:00.000+08:00

23th Oct 05
Sunday
I'm as busy as usual, working on a couple of jobs for this weekend. One which is a commercial that's going to be ended in 3 weeks. Another info-mercial which will due in 1 more week. Both are intensed like hell that I almost can't breath under the pressure of work.

In order to taking out the pressure of work.... I've decided to take a ride out for some fresh air.

Vroom... Vroom... Vroommm....

With my ferrari of course

And a companion..... hehehe...

Looks familiar?? yeah... it's suria KLCC

I always wonder to myself... how come these people so free on weekends? do they have a problem? (Well... real problem is i'm a workaholic)

Bumped in to a Dunhill stock clearance... Originally I thought it's a boutique for "uncles (old)". But I've got attracted by those smart suit at the entrance... see what that man checking out there? that leathered suit is simply Roxxors!! I was about to get one. Until....

I can't believe it... It's RM 11,420 before the 50% discount. Yeah, it's right. It's cost 11k for just a fucking leathered suit! I thought it's just over a thousand for one... even after discount, it still going to cost me RM 5,710. OMG.... I can buy a new laptop instantly if i have the cash.

Undenyably, I have to wave goodbye to this suit. Maybe I'll pick one up like this in future (if i'm rich enough).

Before we leave, allow me to pick up something for release stress.

Oh yeah... baby... THIS is the ultimate intention of coming all this way to KLCC. But what i'm wanna buy is no ordinary chocolate.

I've bought a pack of strawberry chocolate dips and 2 sticks of banana chocolate dips. There's also marshmellows and waffles chocolate dips but I favor fruits over those junks.

That's all about my little adventure on this weekend. The rest of it is all about work work work... When can I have some real sleep at night??

Weekend- Party and Work

2005-10-17T03:39:00.000+08:00

Hands down, there's very few weekends that I end up without heavy scheduling at all. And there's no exceptional for this week too.
Well... It's all started out from friday (pre-weekend) where I have to work on a character at "2wisted" studio. That's where Lor employed as full time. Thanks to him I've go this part time job for the moment as character modeler/rigger/shader artist on an intersting job.
See my Ferrari 4000 there? with a machine right next to it with a monitor turned on (see a character through the monitor). That's my temporary station (except my laptop).
My work here is pretty much at the wrapping up stage where I still have a few riggings to do. Hopefully my pay day isn't going to be too far.

Right after the helping up in the studio. I've to immediately attend for Wee Liam's (my student. Yeah, he didn't pass up my last homework) birthday party. I've rushed home, grab his present (an old cg book) and picked up Chee Shyong at his studio nearby.

The party was filled with quite some numbers of younger kids (17-21). We had a hard time communicate with them in their online gaming discussions but we actually had some rather happy moments in our karaokay session. I was singing Jacky Cheung's song. Chee Shyong does shows his vocal talent in "Beyond's - Hoi Fut Tin Hung". Made a friend here name Hong (He loves "Soft Hard Masters" as much as I do).

Here is Wee Liam the rich birthday kid with a sister which appeared to be younger than he does and a mom who looks more like his older sis. At least that's how Chee Shyong put it.

I was pretty much staying at home through saturday to polishing up the job I'm working on. At night I've watched "The Sound Of Thunder" in the cinema. To be honest, as a production person. This film is horrible in their special FX shots. The acting of actors are cheesy enough to put me sleep through the whole film. As I've already knew that the CG should be great. They've been using 3dsmax for this job where it suppose to demostrate the superb muscles and animations ability of this software. Unfortunately I've got to admit that it fails miserably. The quality just hasn't cut it yet, Greenscreen mate are too obvious sometimes and even the grainy-ness of the picture quality (live act) gives away that they had a bad lighting team which doesn't take the correct dynamic range in order to takes enough details for color balance and brightness tweak in post. The story wise is atleast a little more original than "Sky High". Anyway, this movie is suppose to be the type that goes straight to DVDs video.

Sunday morning, I've to wake up early in the morning (5am) to get ready to attend for a shooting session at Shooting Valley, Glennmarry. It's a commercial job i'm working at for DNA studio. To be ur surprise, our talent today is Andrea Fonseka (Miss Malaysia 2004). to be honest, alot of us still doubt why a girl like her can get herself in to Miss Universe Peagent. When we see her in person, well... she isn't really that fat in gown after all. She seemed like didn't sleep at all last night, as if stay through the whole night in a saturday night clubbing and attend our shooting call right away at sun rise.
Meet the crew.

I have to be here because of this Limbo with markers on limbo and floor. It's a rather complicated shot where I have to track a dolly and tilt shot. The challenge is to make it looks seamlessly blend with the CG background of a cathedrel looking scene.

Meet our Miss Malaysia. "Cis... sombong-nya"... Look at the camera pls.
Haha... well actually she's quite friendly in the morning. Atleast she does reply when I greeted her.

Poor miss malaysia, I've seen her walking down the stair in multiple rehersal. When we are on shoot, director tried to save the film stock so we ended up "ok-ed" in 6 tries. Hey... not bad for 1st shot tho. We still have.... 20-30 shots left. And we were 3 hours behind the original schedule for shoot tho. I'm not too surprise to see the crew working till the mid night.

Believe me... this commercial is going to be beautiful.
haha.... let's hope we didn't screw anything up in my part and make it looks worse than "Sound of thunder" and "The Myth". Don't wanna eat my words for that...

Here's the link to view the clip of the shooting progress. 3gp format 175k.

Surprisingly good student works in my class.

2005-10-11T20:16:00.000+08:00

Today suppose to be due date for a class assignment for my students in class. I've entered the clas an hour earlier to check on my mails and arranging schedules.
As expected, 2 students has been missing in class. and only 4 have present. It's a holiday assignment but only 2 can make it for the deadline.
Surprisingly it's so damm good that I really got to give them applause for that. It has shocked even my boss and the head of school for their out standing result from my class. I hope they can continue their spirits on creating nice artworks like these.

Anyway, the theme for the project is actually for "Under Water World". More will come from the students of Sem5 of Go Academy. Credits of the images goes to Mun Tiong (Sea Horse Soldier) and Chyi Jyn (Mermaid).

Fabulous isn't it?

Good hair day

2005-09-10T13:06:00.000+08:00

I've found some mood today.
decided to finish the hair on the character.
Here's the current stage.

Short Film Progress

2005-09-02T11:47:00.000+08:00

Working on hair now.

Rant! bad day.... thanks to some officers.

2005-08-29T17:43:00.000+08:00

Well... today isn't much of a special day for me. I have a part time job as a lecturer in a local college. Could be admirable by a lot of fulltime worker, of course. I've just took off from work at 1pm. When I was picking up my car. I saw a fine ticket on the windscreen. This must be a mistake because I know precisely where I was parking and the amount of money of parking ticket I've bought. And the ticket was still on the dashboard. Man... This must be a mistake for the officer who issued me this fine ticket. Sigh... Oh well... maybe I should take the time to make an appeal to ask them to cancel this fine.

I've took the time to drove all the way to MPSJ (Majlis Perbandaran Subang Jaya). Took me almost 30 minutes even that it's just a 5 km drive. Curse the bad traffic! Once I've reach there, followed the unbelievably hard to recognize sign. I've finally found the counter for "Payment and Q&A". On my way in, I've saw big banners everywhere telling us that they are taking flat rate for all of the fine before the Merdeka Day. Great... more reason for me to visit this place today. Ha... I've took the liberty to queue up to wait for my turn. This part took me another 20 minutes. I can see angst in everyone lining up before me. Sigh... Why doesn't Malaysia government department do something about it instead of letting only 2 skinny looking (I doubt they've got such energy) Malay girl looking after the counter? ok... I've just shut the fuck up and waiting for my turn.

20 minutes passed... Wwweee! It's my turn! great. I can finally tell them how bored I was waiting back there. But since I was losing time from my limited hours in Monday. I'd rather just "kick right at the front door" to tell her my problem. She just showed me a blank face and commented that I was reversed the face of my parking ticket and put it somewhere instead of dashboard. Damn! I've quickly fired back and told her that I was placing at the same position over the few years I've been driving (since when? 8 years. Yeah, got to be 8 years). Without any delay, I've denied her comment on my parking habit and told her that instead of saying drivers can make personal mistakes. Could the officer who issued me this ticket also committed sin of judgment error? She's just pretend that she's looking elsewhere (hey, I hate this kind of people) and keep mumbling to herself that this is the kind of case that they don't take care of and she'd rather I write an appeal letter to their office. Sigh... I don't think we are making any progress here cause if the person with the valid documents (my parking ticket, right time, right value and right attitude) doesn't please her enough to process my appeal. They're definitely not taking me seriously for this case and rather just ignore me with "post" method to avoid looking at "angry" tax payers like us.

Ok... without hesitation, I took out my wallet and willing to pay for the flat rate instead of spending the time to go over all of the letter writing, phone calls, shouting and etc. Now, what she told me is "I'm not processing fine payment, you've to go to the other counter instead." God, is she playing me? Now I'm totally pissed off and rather just keep the ticket and let them come to me. Anyway, MPSJ doesn't really make much harm for us even if we don't pay out fine. A police ticket will cause more harm if we don't get it settled right away. So I've just drove off and make the way to Pos Malaysia at cargo area in KLIA.

It was a long way, roughly about 50km. When I reach there, greeted by the police at the guard house. They seem to be quite friendly. At first I had quite a good impression on them. Then they lead me the way to the collection area for my package from an anonymous sender. I wasn't sure who sent me that package and no one notify me what was inside the package. I was a little scare at first. Worrying that it was some sort of bomb or even Anthrax in it. The registration guy told me that it was a bunch of CDs. Now the feeling of fear has been escalated. What if there's a bunch of porn cd-roms or even pirated cds inside? It'll make my day for getting myself in to prison. The inspection officer ordered me to open it. ok... let's find out what's inside. Thanks god! you've really made my day. It was a bunch of operating system installer cds inside -Ubuntu 5.04. Luckily this won't make me any harm because it's a bunch of free open sourced Linux CDs that I've ordered from http://www.ubuntulinux.org . The inspector look at me at amazed and thought that it cost thousands of dollars. I've explained carefully to the inspector that it's open source and it doesn't cost me a dime. And also told him the benefit of using it in our pcs. He was also amazed that those CD distribution that I had has got Intel, AMD64 and Mac PPC packages. Which made him interested to try. I've gave him 2 copies of Intel and AMD64 CDs so that I can "bribe" him for future convenience. Haha...

Finally I can take off and back to my mom's curtain store to wait for her to go home. But, the police (guard) at the gate stopped me for the getting back the pass. And out of the sudden he burst out the most sensitive conversation came out a humble policeman, "Boss, boleh bagi sedikit minum teh ke? (Can you gives me a few buck for a cup of tea?)" He's looking for a bribe... oh man... this is not right. I just hate seeing this kind of beggar around dressing in uniforms. Without any hesitation, I just told him that I'm a poor kid with no extra money and just drove off and no look back.

What a disappointment. I thought he's the first nice person I've met today. Maybe there's just no more good, clean policeman in Malaysia anymore. Every police I've came across just happens to be well dressed crook begging for money. This is the part that I believe our government should have got the problem seek in to and get it solved fast. This is just one of the problem that polluted our society and ends up having an uncivilized country.

Now, I'm sitting at Starbucks of Summit, Subang Jaya. Great... With free Wifi Access (something to cheer me up atleast). I've sat down on a comfortable soft laying my precious laptop on the table. Holding "Davinci Code" with my left hand and I've typed this blog just right here at precisely at 5.33pm right now. Finally I can have a good rest reading a good book and enjoying a thick refreshing Rumbha Frappocino coffee.

At this state of mind, I can safely shouting in my mind. "Fuck you! fuck all of the idiots I've met today!!"

Thank you.

(I'll post some photo when I've got home)

KFC's Secret Maya Recipe 3 - Multipass Skin and Relighting

2005-08-27T17:55:00.000+08:00

Follow up to my previous post

KFC's Secret Maya Recipes 2: Doodling with Channel Lighting

Here I've started a new research on seperating pass from Misss Fast Skin Shader in Maya in to different passes and composite the passes in After FX by using the Walker Effects Plugin. Advantage of using Walker Effects is that it came with a filter called "channel lighting". I can prepare a directional RGB pass (normal pass) and use it as a lighting info input to the filter in order to add diffuse over the color pass.

Here's the passes I've used for this skin test.

Color Pass - Slapping the color map on a surface shader. No lighting in the scene was used.

Directional RGB (Diffuse Normal) Pass - This is easy. Using the original Miss shader. Took out the SSS effect, specular. Make diffuse white and emit lights from 3 direction (bump on). Basically according to 3 point setup.

Directional RGB (Specular Normal) Pass - Almost the same as above. Only difference is this time I've made the diffuse in Misss shader to black. Only leaving Specular enabled in this pass. (Bump on)

Ambient Occlusion - This is just a basic MR ambient occlusion texture applied to a surface shader. No lights needed. (Mark reported to me that using "Dirtmap" for this pass can be alot faster and it has got more option to extract nice diffuse pass and environment reflection pass)

SSS pass - This is the Misss Skin shader with black color for diffuse, no specular and only leaving the SSS effect.

Ok... basically what I did here is simple. 1st, I've put the color pass in to the composition. Then follow with a Normal (diffuse) pass. Normal is hidden because I'm just going to use it's light normal info in the "Channel Lighting" filter. It's applied on the color Pass. After this, I've put the SSS pass on top of it by using screen over the image (Level adjusted for subtlety). Next, an Ambient Occlusion pass over it with Multiply mode (Gausian Filtered).

Now I've layered another Specular layer on top of those layers mentioned above. This specular layer has got it's own composition in order to extract the specular highlights individually from the RGB. Screen mode was used on this layer.

Ok... with a little tweaking around like Color balance and etc. You'll be able to create an output almost like this with 1 light on in the channel light option (Red channel). Beautiful part is we can add/minus light in the composition on the fly. Adjusting the light intensity, Colors of light, flipping direction of light and etc can be done in real time. I bet alot of artist will be happy to see this happen straight in compositing stage rather than waiting for hours of test render in 3d application.

2nd Light enabled (blue channel). Tweaking around with intensity and lights. Notice that the back light is enabled now.

Enabling another light from Green channel. Now we've got a light from above.

Ok.... I guess that's it for now. Hope everyone of you will benefit from this tutorial. For me, this is the method I'm using on my current short film in making. It's greatly speeds up my working progress. Compare to before when I was doing all of this in single pass output with FG and etc. It took me about 3 minutes for rendering only the skin. Imagine I have to wait for 3 minutes everytime I did a little adjustment on any attribute. This is taking forever cause only adjusting the skin with the nicest looking value can easily takes me up to days. And FG to me isn't always the best solution because it will introduce artifacts and flickering in the final output.

KFC's Secret Maya Recipes 2: Doodling with Channel Lighting.

2005-08-27T01:32:00.000+08:00

I've just happens to got a chance to play around with the After Effects Plugin from Walker Effect.
It's rather cool to know that I can implement a kind of lighting technique created specially for 3d artist where we can change lighting on the fly in compositing stage. It's uses a method which is called "channel lighting" where we can use RGB light at 3 different source in order to let the software to extract the directions of light.
In order to test this new plugin. I've made a simple maya file in a few passes. Color, Diffuse (AO with imaged based light), Specular, RGB (3 directions),Ambient Occlusion and reflections pass.

Color Pass

Diffuse Pass (IBL Light)

Ambient Occlusion

RGB pass (sometimes I call it Normal pass)

Reflection Pass

Specular Pass

Now..... here's a little result after playing around with random settings.

Something I came out with accidentally with all of this pass. It seems quite cool tho. That's why I rather keep this instead. I've manage to tweak lighting on the fly and beable to match lighting to real footage pretty easily. I guess I'll be sticking to After Effect a little longer since I've got this nice little plugin here which can do all of the trick i need in shake.

I do have a few things I wanna do experiments on this plugin in this few days. Thinking of the simplicity of the rendered pass I need and also the time I can save from doing rendering output from maya in this way. One thing for sure is it's taking alot more hard disk space than usual. Someone might starts thinking about using jpg as the solution to this. But we definately needs to add a string "AW_JPEG_Q_FACTOR=100" to either our environment variable or maya.env file. Without this string is not cool because maya by default output with lower jpeg compression. So you ended up with lower quality results from compositor (bad antialiasing and etc).

Well... I can see that using this method, we can easily match lighting or even light our characters/objects in compositor very easily. Sometimes it's even easier than doing it in 3d software.

More info about this will come when I found time to use it on an actual production.

KFC's Secret Maya Recipes 1 - Fake Particles Flow In A Vein Loop

2005-08-24T15:15:00.000+08:00

ok... here's a stupid maya technique that I've came out with playing around with maya at starbuck (what a nice place to find inspirations). It's actually a technique to make particle flow inside a vein in a loop. Well... I was trying to achieve something like that for a project I was doing. But unfortunately It wasn't successful.
So what I did was trying to do it with another method which is faked by textures and surface which move along a path.

Here's how I do it.
Ok... Let's starts by creating 2 nurbs curve. Arrange it like the thumbnails. So that we can create a torus (rim) with history on.

The beauty of using history on is, we can later change the height ratio of the ring by scaling the smaller nurbs curve we've used for creating this ring.

Now turn to component mode and view the vertice mode. Drag select all of the vertices of the ring. And assign a cluster on all of the vertices above.

Animate this cluster handle with rotation of 0 at frame 0 and 360 at frame 500. Play the animation now the ring will turn in circle.

Now create a simple shader of noise texture on a lambert shader. Plugged the noise textures in the incadescence in order to eliminate the need of using any lights in the scene.

After assigning the shader to the rotating ring. Use the "Soft Modification Tools" to deform it to the desired path shape.
Now play the button and all of those small little white spots there will runs in full loop over time along the path.
Well... with this, u can render a sequence of mask for your favorite compositing sofware to prepare layers to fake flakes flowing in veins or tubes.

Enjoy...

Ok... Here we goes.

2005-08-22T21:42:00.000+08:00

Ok... here we goes. This is my first blog.
As a 3d artist, I do feel that I've the responsibility to make a record of my life. Since blogging seems to be starting to be a hit for everybody. Maybe it's not such a bad idea to start recording some technical research I've found along my daily job.

Now here we are. Reading much blog might going to be wierd for some people cause most likely I'll be talking alot about Art, 3D, games, Linux, Computer stuff and movies. ah... If I've the time. I might add a little review on everything I ever touched and tried.

Ok... Let's start with my brand new Acer Ferrari 4000

Sexy.... isn't she?
I've bought her 2 weeks ago at a rather good bargain from a shop at Pyramid. Well... that salesman was rather nervious when I talked to him in english. for a moment he was rather scared to answer me and lose control on the bargain. At the end, I've got this sweetie at the price of RM5500 (another RM50 for 1 percent credit card tax). Originally most computer shop in Malaysia charges credit card user for 2 percent. But due to his in-mature salesman experience and his soft hearten nature. He just charges me 1 percent for tax (afraid of losing a customer I guess). Ha... Well... I've further pushing him more on discount (poor guy), he even told me about the skim of promotional machine they got and the lowest price he can give. due to the reason i knew that I've already got a rather good bargain, I rather allow him to earn a little money for being generous on the bargain. I've asked around at shops nearby (one of the shop keeper is my old classmate, this fella don't even gives me a discount), lowest price they can give is RM5800 not including tax.

Oh God... She's sweet isn't she?
AMD 64 Turion processor, X700 ATI radeon (eventho i'm not an ATI fan, more of a Nvidia fan. I even own a Quadro FX 4000 desktop).

I'm trying to fully exploits this baby. But due to some restriction in Winxp x64, I can't manage to change quite alot of stuff and software. But other than this, it Roxx!! interms of performance and stability. I've even installed suse 9.3 64bit and Vidalinux (gentoo) 1.2 64bit for a spin. Currently I've some problem with APIC timer under linux. But I've found this http://www.triplenet.dk/~xerne/linux/Ferrari.htm
Written by Martin which is very helpful in helping me to get the problem solved. including x700 installation under linux and etc. Currently i'm a litte bz on jobs so apic timer patch is something that waiting to be done on weekends or after the completion of my freelance job.

Oh well... under winxp, it's running Maya 7.0 (and 6.5), Modo 102 and Zbrush very smoothly.

Speaking about 3d art. I've had an interesting "arguements" with Mark Soon (super talented 3d artist) over the messanger about how to seperate passes for Misss fast Skin Shader (Mentalray Shader came with Maya) in to Color, diffuse, reflection, SSS (tranlucent), Ambient Occlusion passes. Our discussion involved in to Steven's method of Skin shading (old school but works), Confusion in Misss of being rendered good as single beauty pass where we doubt it might look different if we seperate the passes and comp it back together again. But due to the our strict believe in speed up our workflow by render passes instead of (tedious) single beauty pass method, we are planning to do such test in order to prove our points in extracting multipass for renderings.

Oh wel... Again, Let's pray for more time. (I wonder whether there's a temple dwelled by a "time god" where I can worship to gain more time.... Haha...)

Oh Mark... One Utama's old phase Starbuck doesn't have free internet excess anymore. This suxx!! my new spot for Wifi access is Ikano's Starbuck.

Well... getting a little tired for now. Maybe I'll start blogging more about it tomorrow.

Cheers... I hope I'll still have enough time to sleep after completing the freelance job. And make it up for tomorrow's lecturing job in college. God.... Please give me a little more time.